The Jungle by Upton Sinclair depicts the horrors and hardships faced by immigrants and the working class during the industrial revolution.Sinclair focuses on the working conditions of employees of a meat factory. These struggles with working conditions and disease are considered quite inhumane by modern standards. The new spike in demand for goods across America during the industrial revolution created factories, which dehumanised workers in an effort to increase profits. Sinclair describes the back breaking work and the effects of it on the workers health and spirits. He describes their experience as the most difficult kind of work that “wore out the most powerful men in a few years”. He also describes the many diseases and disabilities such…
The Jungle by author Upton Sinclair is a story about Jurgis Rudkus and his family who immigrated to America from Lithuania. Jurgis, his wife Ona and their relatives end up getting conned into buying a house with all of their savings near the stockyards and meat packing district in Chicago. Jurgis winds up working in the slaughterhouse where conditions are harsh and unsafe and the pay is low. All of the relatives including the women and the children have to go out and have to seek work to make…
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, is a fictional literary work that illustrates the labor conditions in the Chicago stockyards, describing the harsh realities immigrants faced and exposing the callous side of human nature. The Jungle is a depressing realization of how unregulated capitalistic corporation and monopolies treated human beings as less than human, with complete disregard for the workers' well-being. Throughout the book, Sinclair displays the struggles of an immigrant family in order…
Many facets of Upton Sinclair’s book relate and portray different parts of the meatpacking industry. Many believe the title itself relates back to the cruelty seen in the business. The story follows a man named Jurgis who had recently moved from Lithuania to a Chicago suburb, called Packingtown in reference to Chicago’s meatpacking district in the early 1900s. With him, Jurgis brought eleven of his family members, including his father, his young wife named Ona, and Ona’s stepmother, step-uncle,…
Upton Sinclair and his work ‘The Jungle’ impacted the United States during the 20th century because it gave people a visual on the kind of “meat” they actually ate, how the food was treated, as well as how the animals lived amongst the people during the time before the process into food began. Sinclair once stated, “I aimed at the public’s heart by accident hit it’s stomach.” Sinclair’s intentions were to inform people of the poor conditions the immigrants faced during this time while featuring…
Webster defines the word immigrant, as a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence. In the novel, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair the word immigrant takes on a whole new meaning. The immigrants in the novel are in search of the American dream, but after arriving in America that dream becomes a nightmare. Sinclair describes the journey of the immigrant working class in the meatpacking industry as “wage slavery”. “Sinclair writes that the immigrant population was "dependent…
Upton Sinclair's showed the harsh reality of the lives immigrants had during the 1900s. Packingtown was a hive of corruption the moment Jurgis and his family moved to the town. The town is parasitic and feeds of the immigrant's misfortunes. “The way the bosses made the pacemakers work and other people were very dangerous for the safety of all the people. They made the pacemakers work like possessed men.” (Pg.56 P.2) The meat packing plant places the almighty dollar above the safety of the…
Arguably, no piece of literature (besides Uncle Tom’s Cabin) has been more influential than The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair. Sinclair “aimed at the public’s heart” when exposing the hardships “wage-slaves” had to endure in a capitalistic society; however, by accident, he “hit [the public] in the stomach” when the only reforms were in the meat-packing industry (What Life Means to Me). Jurgis, Sinclair’s example of a “wage-slave”, changed throughout the novel and was initially optimistic…
American author, Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. wrote nearly 100 books in several genres. His work was popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. His novel, “The Jungle,” depicted the grim conditions and oppressed lives in the meatpacking industries in the United States. The industry was a tough, dangerous, and filthy place, but it was a job. The Jungle was about a couple who immigrated to Chicago in search of work and a better life. As soon…
and Eric Schlosser “Fast Food Nation” (2011) report the abomination that happen in the meatpacking industry in the United States. Upton Sinclair is an American writer of nearly 100 books, in 1906 became famous for his novel “The Jungle” which describe the conditions of meatpacking industry in US. On the other hand Eric Schlosser was a journalist and became famous for his book “Fast Food Nation”. Nevertheless, except the subject, those two text are completely different. Upton Sinclair wrote his…